Re Rakesh's [6980]: > Marx after all does not say that the slave himself has the same role > in production as any other piece of fixed capital. In fact Marx says > many times in other places that modern slaves did produce surplus > value, not just a surplus product. He says that "many times in other places", does he? > Why did Marx refer to the money invested in the purchase of slaves as > CAPITAL at all if he did not think modern plantation slavery was a > form of the capitalistic production of surplus value? Interesting question since, in the passage from V2, while he ends the passage referring to the South in the USA, most of the passage (which _begins_ with: "In the slave system, the money capital laid out on the purchase of labour-power plays the role of fixed capital in money form, ....", p. 554) concerns the *ancient* slave system in Athens, the Greek states, Rome, etc. > Which is exactly what Marx says directly elsewhere. I feel confident > that you know the quote in vol I to which I am referring. The > surprising thing is that you do not feel compelled to speak about it. I don't feel "compelled" to speak about it. It's not all that significant a passage, imo, when placed in context. It is an interesting quotation, though, for reasons I describe below. What is most remarkable, though, is how little there is in Volume 1 that you can hang your hat on. In approx. 15 pages (21 if we count "Results") where there are references to slavery there is only the 1 -- as we shall see, ambiguous -- passage that says what you want it to say. The passage in question is from Ch. 10, Section 2 and is at the end of the first paragraph. The Penguin edition ends the paragraph with: "It is no longer a question of obtaining from him a certain quantity of useful products, but rather the production of surplus-value itself. The same is true of the corvee, in the Danubian Principalities for instance" (345). Interestingly, the Moore and Aveling translation Is: "it is now a question of production of surplus-labour itself" (Kerr ed., p. 260). When I looked-up the original passage in German (1981 Ullstein Buch Nr. 35091), the Fowkes translation would seem to be more accurate since it reads "Mehrwerts" rather than "Merharbeit" (201). Perhaps Moore & Aveling were trying to translate what they thought Marx meant rather than a literal translation? This is poor practice indeed for translators, but it is easy to understand why they might have thought that was what he meant. Let us recall that the subject of both the sub-section and the paragraph is surplus labor rather than surplus value. Let us also recall his statement, when comparing the developed plantation system in the South, that he wrote that "the same is true of the corvee". The way I understand the sentence *in context* is that production developed from the production of "useful products" alone to the production of commodities (here understood to mean, presumably in this context, products which are produced in order to be sold and thereby have both a use-value and an exchange-value) where the slaves performed surplus-labor-time. Let us then consider the corvee system in which "the same is true". To begin with, the ruling class in the corvee system were landlords. There were other similarities to feudalism, e.g. there were rents in kind. The corvee is described not as "surplus-value itself" the next page (Penguin, p. 346) but as "tribute". My reading of the surplus-labor-time performed (see p. 347) was that it was not primarily engaged in commodity production. And, unlike cotton, these products I don't believe were sold on world markets. Clearly, there wasn't abstract labor but the expenditure of labor time on concrete activities specified by the code. In context, thus, the only way that this passage could *mean* surplus-value is for us to accept the proposition -- which I think Marx rejects elsewhere (but, as I suggested previously, there is some inconsistency on his part) -- is to interpret the meaning as "surplus-labor itself" -- which is, after all, the subject (rather than surplus value) of this sub-section. It is true that elsewhere, in the drafts for what became Volume 3, that Marx seems to widen his comprehension of the conditions under which surplus-value is created and who thereby produces surplus value. You might recall that Gil picked-up on many of those passages. Now you, ironically, are following in Gil's footsteps. Yet, in context, I think this refers not to the production of surplus-value but to the (re) *distribution* of surplus value among capitalists and other classes (e.g. landlords). This, I think, is why Marx did not discuss the question further in Volume 1 in terms of whether or not modern slaves produce surplus value (even though he discussed slavery, including plantation slavery, itself in many other places in VI): i.e. it is a topic which can only be fully understood later at a less abstract level of abstraction where there is an examination of the re-distribution of surplus value internationally and where the world market is grasped. In solidarity, Jerry
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